Neel Somani - Eclipse, L2s, and Ecosystem Building
Oct 12, 2023
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Neel Somani, the founder of Eclipse, discusses his personal journey in crypto, building an L2, dream customers, go-to-market strategy, differentiated ecosystem, Eclipse's culture, time management, and building a cap table.
Eclipse aims to transform Solana L1 into a fully verifiable Ethereum L2, providing superior throughput and performance.
Eclipse advocates for shared chains as a solution to the fragmentation and congestion issues of app-specific rollups.
Eclipse's go-to-market strategy involves targeting both Ethereum users and Solana developers, offering a streamlined and user-friendly L2 experience.
Deep dives
Eclipse: Turning Solana into an Ethereum Layer 2
Eclipse is focused on transforming the powerful Solana L1 into a fully verifiable Ethereum Layer 2. By leveraging the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), Eclipse aims to achieve parallelism and shorter block times, providing superior throughput and performance compared to existing EVM-based rollups. The goal is to support a wide range of applications while avoiding fragmentation of liquidity and improving user experience. Eclipse plans to target both Solana developers looking to go multichain and EVM developers, encouraging them to recompile contracts to Eclipse's bytecode and take advantage of the faster and cheaper execution. The team is also interested in exploring future additions, such as incorporating upgrades like Firedancer, to further enhance the capabilities and scalability of the Eclipse L2.
Appchains and the Future of Rollups
While app-specific rollups have received attention, they may not be economically viable for most use cases due to high fixed costs. Eclipse predicts that many app-specific rollups will not graduate to mainnet as they encounter the expensive reality of running their own chains. Eclipse advocates for shared chains, like their own L2, which can accommodate multiple applications without the need for individual app chains. By removing the assumption of a single-threaded EVM and leveraging parallelism, Eclipse believes it can solve the congestion issues associated with noisy neighbors while providing similar benefits as app-specific rollups. In the long term, Eclipse envisions a migration away from the EVM as developers explore other options, recognizing the superior performance of solutions built with parallelism in mind.
Go-to-Market Strategy and Differentiation
Eclipse's go-to-market strategy involves emphasizing the merits of the SVM-based approach and targeting Ethereum users. While also appealing to Solana developers to go multichain with Eclipse's L2. Eclipse aims to differentiate itself by offering a fully verifiable Solana-based L2 that supports high throughput and superior scalability. It seeks to address the fragmentation and complexity issues associated with app-specific rollups, providing a more streamlined and user-friendly experience. While still in the early stages, Eclipse envisions the future incorporation of Solidity projects and adoption by EVM developers seeking faster and cheaper execution. Governance and token considerations will be explored further after the mainnet launch.
Building a Strong Ethereum Community and Addressing Solana's TVL Gap
The podcast explores the value proposition and decision framework behind launching Eclipse as an Ethereum L2 solution. It highlights the importance of having a strong Ethereum community to drive adoption and bridge funds from other chains. Solana's TVL compared to Ethereum's and the pain points for Solana DeFi developers are discussed. The podcast also mentions the need for infrastructure and tooling on the Eclipse network to reach parity with Solana L1. The team is focused on filling in the missing gaps and gathering feedback from real developers. They emphasize the importance of personal touch and being approachable to project teams.
Scaling Support for Applications on Eclipse
The podcast delves into the scalability of support for applications on Eclipse as the number of projects increases. The team plans to have dedicated in-house integration engineers and developers to assist project onboarding. As the ecosystem grows, they will also consider community managers to offer additional support. Discord will be the primary channel for community engagement and easy questions. The team aims to maintain a personal touch and approachability throughout the scaling process. The importance of feedback, successful onboarding of a few initial apps, and mindful hiring to ensure scalability are crucial aspects discussed.
In this episode, we chat with Neel Somani, the founder of Eclipse. We begin with an overview of Neel's personal journey in Crypto, from exploring Cosmos and appchains, to thinking about Rollups-as-a-service, to now building an L2.
We then dig into Neel's dream customer, Eclipse's go-to-market strategy, and how they are building a differentiated ecosystem. Lastly, we dig into Eclipse's culture, how Neel manages his time, and how he thinks about building a cap table.
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